Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.
It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.
Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.
So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.
Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
Freedom Of Speech
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.
Ronald Dworkin towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:
Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.
So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.
Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.
In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.
Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having They are merely his intellectual offspring.
Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
Religion
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.
Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’
Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.
On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.
Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.
Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.
In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”
and
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
Miscarriages of Justice
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.
On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.
At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.
He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.
He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.
Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.
In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.
A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.
He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:
…You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?
Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies
Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’
Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
Post Truth
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
and
It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other
Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
Self-Care
We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
and
Let us cultivate our garden.
And he did so for twenty-five years.
So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.
He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.
He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.
Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon
In an age of unrestrained Russian-bashing, the figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky might seem a provocative choice for this Public Intellectual series. He remains, however, in my view, the greatest writer of prose fiction who has ever lived. His greatest novels The Devils/Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) are, frankly, unsurpassed in world literature.
As I see it, other great Russian novels of his time, Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev and Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy are just a notch below; perhaps reaching the heights of Crime and Punishment (1866) or The Idiot (1869), the two lesser of his four great novels.
This is to assume that his other works are of lesser value. Yet in the novella Notes from an Underground (1864) as well as White Knights (1848) Dostoevsky surpasses The Death of Ivan Illich (1886) by Tolstoy.
The anti-hero of Notes from an Underground anticipates a form of government where:
All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear … in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.
This he suggests would create a reaction, in the form of a dictator:
I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will!
In fact, across Russian literature only Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov wrote better short story writers. Besides being a master of the short story form, Chekhov was primarily a playwright. Unprecedented in world letters, he is almost the equal of Dostoevsky, but not quite!
In Russian letters thereafter only the great novels of Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1967) and The White Guard (1925) the latter of which perfectly encapsulates – unlike our official media – the reasons for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Many Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians) view what was the breadbasket of the Russian empire as integral to and inseparable from Russia itself.
Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
In a famous monograph (1959), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, George Steiner argued that the two authors represent polar opposites in the Western canon, the former epic, utopian, and aspiring to achieve heaven on earth – with all its attendant dangers. The latter, for all his peasant Christianity and hatred of nihilism, asserting the pre-eminence of free will, while portraying a world beset by evil, intrigue and deceit.
The great Russian effete of a later era Vladimir Nabokov, lecturing in exile in Columbia University claimed he despised Dostoevsky’s vulgarity and excess. Of course, unlike Nabokov, Tolstoy or Turgenev – the latter of whom Dostoevsky had a fractious relationship – Dostoevsky was not an aristocrat. He was not a blue blood. His father was a ‘mere’ country doctor, murdered after a descent into dissolution and an echo, Freud argues in Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), of the central theme of The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Dostoevsky was profoundly anti-Catholic
It should also be said that Dostoevsky was an editor, journalist, and social critic, which could be a dangerous role to play in Czarist Russia. He was really a philosopher in that all his great books are novels of ideas, and display in all its fullness the eschatological imagination. An intellectual of the highest rank, and superb jurist and penologist, not just in terms of the immense amount of attention devoted to questions of justice and the criminal process in his work – not least the trial of Dmitri Karamazov – but also heavily influenced by his penal servitude in Siberia.
Also, uncomfortably for this writer at least, he was a deeply religious man, and there was no hypocrisy evident in this outlook. He acquired a deep religious faith from his mother during his childhood, quite contrary to the secular temper of his age. While I distrust this, I understand in Freudian terms its aetiology.
He was, however, deeply anti-Catholic. At one point his apparetnly omniscient Idiot, Prince Myshkin exclaims:
In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinate to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn’t that the teachings of the Antichrist?’
Dostoevsky, 1847.
Early Period
In his school years, splendidly documented by his great biographer Joseph Frank he intervened to protect children against thugs. On his way to the prestigious engineering school, where he was accepted in 1831, he was horrified by an act of savage brutality against a peasant he witnessed at a coach station. Later, through his hugely influential periodical Diary Of A Writer – not unlike Charles Dickens’ Household Words or All The Year Round towards the end of his life – he declaimed against a brutal flogging of a serf by an aristocrat, who was put on trial and justly punished. There is no doubt that from the get-go his sympathies were with the little man. Thus, like Charles Dickens he was the chronicler of his time in Time.
Thus, for his entire life no matter how famous he became he was always an advocate for the poor, students if they had legitimate grievances, those falsely accused, unless, unforgivably, they were Jewish. Poor Folks (1845) is of course his first novel and is a huge success and a minor masterpiece. It is, however, an elaboration of that greater Russian work Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol whose awful theme is the purchasing of dead peasants’ souls for profit. The ultimate extension of the landlord class. This is again prescient for our times.
Poor Folks was acclaimed as the first exercise in social realism, and the plight of self-abnegation before corporate feudalism. Here we find words relevant to our neoliberal age: ‘Judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and be reduced to undignified mortification.’ Today’s serfs are subject to social media targeting in an age of surveillance and consumer capitalism. Our very identities are mined for data.
Poor Folks was followed by The Double (1846), which though not among his great novels expresses the split personality – a dominant theme in his oeuvre to come – as later do Oscar Wilde in A Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), Robert Louis Stephenson in Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and more recently Naomi Kleins’ Doppleganger A Trip into the Mirror World.
Vissarion Belinsky
Belinsky
During this early period Dostoevsky came under the influence of the intellectual Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky who was torn between the veneration of the poor – a form of Christian humanism – and an overarching commitment to materialism. The book expresses that conflict.
The success of Poor Folk led him to being welcomed into intellectual circles. An unfortunate association with the Petrashevsky Circle, however, led to him being exiled to Siberia and then conscripted into the army. Moreover, he strongly believed he was about to be executed as the Tsar staged a mock execution of him and his co-conspirators in Samonkey Square. Interestingly, one of those involved in his persecution was Ivan Nabokov, a distant relative of Vladimir Nabokov.
This terrifying event it is said to have turned his head grey. It scarred him for life and was fictionally recreated in The Idiot (1869). We may assume that the description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding the Czarist firing squad. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’
That and Siberia, where he underwent extreme hardship led to the fascination that engendered Crime and Punishment. In Siberia, as diarised by his biographer, he became less interested and mistrustful of the application of the letter, as opposed to the spirit of the law. Dostoevsky was never a literalist in legal interpretation terms, and was acutely conscious of the law’s failings. He was treated barbarically and barely survived. The law and its failings went on to dominate much of the rest of his fiction.
He returned a felon but quickly contributed to Time magazine, along with several other journals thereafter as editor and contributor, and to his next defining book The House of The Dead (1854), which offers a far better examination of the gulags than Solzhenitsyn.
Hans Hobern’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.
Nihilism
This period of incarceration led to the development of a complex dialectic through his life. His hatred of nihilism – a phrase actually coined by Turgenev for the character Bazharov in his masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862), alongside his warm embrace of Young Russia, a movement recalling Thomas Davis in Ireland and Disraeli in Britain. It was a progressive movement for reform in Russia, not least in seeking to ameliorate the conditions of the serfs.
Dostoevsky despised the nihilistic attitude, expressed ironically in Turgenev’s masterpiece: ‘That is not our business let us have a grand clearance first.’
The Russia of his lifetime, from Nicolas I onwards, was a time of great political turbulence and the development of revolutionary cabals often to reform the plight of the serfs. There was also a dialectic perfectly conveyed between Turgenev and Dostoevsky of a need for Russia to become more European. Turgenev, the aristocratic exile, argued for to become more autarchic. Dostoevsky sided with the poor folk and Mother Russia but not in a shrill way. The idea he coined, evident as early as 1861, was Pan Humanism, within a Russia influenced, but not dominated, by Westernisation.
The success led to a degree of European decadence, and for the rest of his life he was often abroad and in debt, though finally happily married after a string of unhappy relationships to Anna, his stenographer who he adored and was most attentive to.
What became a gambling addiction developed during his peripatetic European travels, and put enormous stress on his wife. Yet, in a moment of epiphany, after essentially losing the family silver, he finally gave it all up. His great novella The Gambler (1866) offers a frenzied portrayal of an illness, which destroys lives – as I have witnessed during my professional career. It also provides a lacerating attack on enduring national cultures. Here, Russians are portrayed as gambling riskily and haphazardly, Germans methodically and in a philistine way, while the French display an elegant decadence. How times have changed.
Prior to The Gambler there arrived the seminal existential text, unique in his oeuvre, Notes from Underground (1865), which predates Sartre and Camus by an epoch but is no doubt influenced by Kierkegaard.
The self-reflexiveness of the narrator in that he is both accused and accuser, torn between rational egoism and a concern for others. This is the Dostoevsky dilemma, and a prelude to the themes of the great novels to follow.
So on to Crime and Punishment (1868), written for the establishment Russian magazine Messenger, and a final step towards financial stability. It is his most famous and widely read work. To say it is not his best work would be true, but misleading in that within it scope it remains one of the great works of European literature.
The novel is the prototypical detective novel. Without this there is no Wilkie Collins or Raymond Chandler. The anti-hero Raskolnikov is torn between a nihilism inspiring an Übermensch sense of superiority, and a Christian piety. Here Dostoevsky anticipates the serial killers and corporate monsters of our age.
The prosecutor Petrovich is the voice of atonement and represents Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt before God. The book is also a condemnation of extremism and lawlessness.
When the prosecutor first hauls Raskolnikov into custody he expresses curiosity about an article that Raskolnikov wrote called ‘On Crime’, in which he suggests that certain rare individuals – the benefactors and geniuses of mankind – enjoy a right to ‘step across’ legal or moral boundaries if those boundaries act as an obstruction to the success of their idea. The prosecutor, in a much kinder way than the approach offered by Camus in The Outsider (1942) – who was hugely influenced by Dostoevsky not least in his play of The Possessed/Devils (1959) – finally forces him to confess.
The Idiot (1871) is the book that pleased Dostoevsky the most – and is arguably his most disciplined novel – and there is much of him in it. The central character of Prince Myshkin was much influenced by Dostoevsky seeing Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ (1529) painting. No doubt it expresses his deep faith in the decent and Christian man.
Yet Myshkin’s other-worldliness is the cause of his self-destruction, along with death and chaos wrought on others. The crucible of Russia at that time augments dark Dostoevsky’s mysticism. It is deeply personal and invokes his mock execution and epilepsy. It is a work that is curiously relevant to our time of vaccines, compliance and control, where 90% of humanity are to be treated as cattle, a process which can be achieved through re-education and vogueish Social Darwinism.
This brings us to the great citadel of world literature and in my view the greatest novel ever written The Devils (1868). At the time Dostoevsky was much influenced by the malign neglect of the civilised anarchist Herzen and his criticism that nihilists wished to abandon books, science and instead embrace destruction. Herzen in a famous polemic, echoing Dostoevsky’s own ideas I suspect, argued that Shakespeare and Raphaël were higher in the pantheon than socialism, nationalism or the emancipation of the serfs. The immediate sensation which precipitated the novels was the activities of the real life murderous Nechaev, a model for many of The Devils.
Towards the end of The Devils, one of the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ He responds that it was to promote:
the systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.
The novel is the greatest condemnation of extremism in the history of ideas, containing his essential credo that once you have rejected Christ it is possible to go to inordinate lengths of evil. The book provides almost a replica of the current political climate where anarchy and extremism prevail, and in the midst of it all is the crucial figure of native Dostoevsky ambivalence, Stavrogin – a man who is torn between good and bad impulses, but the nihilism and decadence prevail.
The essential argument is that materialism, nihilism and decadence will stop at nothing and boundary after boundary will be crossed in the descent towards the personal and societal abyss.
Dostoevsky response, or antidote, is to assert that humanity must take collective responsibility in a Christian way. Thus, when Stavrogin reveals his appalling crime to the elder Tikhon, the latter responds by asking the forgiveness of Stavrogin: ‘Having sinned, each man has sinned against all men, and each man is responsible in some way for the sins of others. There is no isolated sin. I’m a great sinner, perhaps greater than you.’
After its publication, and his resumption of journalistic activities with The Diary of a Writer (1873-1881) he was widely acknowledged as the greatest living writer in Russia. He finally settled in his homeland, holding court both in letter and visitations to an increasingly enamoured public. In essence, he became the moral conscience of Russia.
Though the Diary of a Writer – finally published in totality by Scribner’s – contains some of his greatest short stories. He also rages against injustice and took a keen interest in the criminal process.
Dostoyevsky’s notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.
The Brothers Karamazov
Thereafter he began his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. His sensitivity to injustice, it must be said, is afflicted with one blind spot, lest this piece be represented as hagiographical! He showed a lifelong hatred of Jews, who he and Turgenev too often caricatured, in the most vicious of terms. When a Jew was correctly acquitted, he bemoaned the verdict. In this sense he a creature of his time, but also trespassed a moral boundary.
His antisemitism was a product of at times, a Little Russian mentality and his sense of the volk, so there is a negative and abhorrent mysticism here of old tensions, resurfacing in our age. Also, his embrace of what might be described as Populism at this stage has dangerous relevance to our time.
Many of his great books were written like cliffhangers under enormous stress explaining the fervid prose, and as every book of his final novel – three years in genesis – came out the public reacted in a way not unlike the London public’s reaction to the death of Little Nell. His work, along with his literary peers, forged Russian consciousness, for better or worse.
This culminated in a famous face off where all the intelligentsia of Russia attended an event to celebrate Pushkin’s anniversary. A feud had been brewing for decades between two opposite visions of Mother Russia, one represented by Turgenev with his condescending attitude towards the poor folk and his internationalism; the other by Dostoevsky who represented the Christian Tsarist nationalist strain.
Dostoevsky’s great speech at the banquet is well worth reading. It effectively destroys the reputation of Turgenev and had the impact at the time of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ It ends in a beautiful expression of compromise and Pan Humanism, envisioning a Christian Russia sympathetic to the poor, but receptive to other cultures, urging respect for tradition but acknowledging a need for reform and tolerance.
It arrived while he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, by which time the debts, the epilepsy, the chaotic lifestyle and huge fame had taken their toll, He was writing around the clock to complete it, with old father time breathing down his neck.
This book is a foundation stone of literate moderate civilisation, containing everything of the selfless Christianity and love he espoused, embodied in the character of Aloysha, who is a more modulated version of Myshkin from The Idiot. It contains some of the greatest passages in literature, including The Grand Inquisitor dialogue, and culminates in over one hundred pages of the trial of Dmitry Karamazov for parricide.
It should be said that like Dickens, Dostoevsky distrusted lawyers, not least their tendency to allow their eloquence to overflow at the expense of the truth, and their blindness to the moral consequences of their action. The representation of the defence speech in Karamazov is deliberately weak. Even though, as the book makes clear, Dmitry is morally guilty for his monster father’s death, he is not legally guilty. Yet the defence lawyers seem to rely on the mercy plea, and on a confused argument suggesting implicitly some people deserve to be killed. Not exactly a full throttle defence, but one recently evident in Ireland.
Dostoyevsky identifies a broad moral continuum between a capacity for the highest and basest thoughts and deeds. If any character represents the views of Dostoyevsky himself it is perhaps the chief prosecutor Ippolit Krillovitch, who, uncannily, like the author, dies within a few months of the novel’s central events: the apparent patricide, and aftermath, of the wily and debauched Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. His sons represent different faces of a timeless character, and in the ensuing trial Krillovitch draws attention to the inadequacies of each. So searing are the insights that Dimitri is prompted to thank his own prosecutor, admitting that he: ‘told me a lot about myself that I didn’t know’.
Krillovitch describes those of the Karmazov ilk as having: ‘natures with such a broad sweep… capable of encompassing all manner of opposites, of contemplating both extremes at one and the same time – that which is above us, the extremity of the loftiest ideals, and that which is below us, the extremity of the most iniquitous degradation.’ He adds: ‘others have their Hamlets; so far, we Russians have only our Karamazovs.’ That Karamazov archetype surely extends beyond Russia.
The reception to The Brothers Karamazov was ecstatic, and his finances looked permanently healthy, but accounts of the time show how frail he had become. The multiple social engagement at this stage were not helpful and a stroke occurred after some final pieces in Diary of a Writer, many published after his death.
All of Russia mourned the death of a man who had been sent to Siberia. They had lost their great writer and intellect.
Dostoevsky’s funeral,
Legacy
For our present age there is much to ponder over Dostoyevksy’s legacy. First is the need for the assertion of Christian, or humanist values. This includes the establishment of community, even if, as I would argue, this remains secular in its guidance. Moreover, we must protect the poor, the falsely accused and the defenceless. Moral nihilism in all its guises must also be opposed. And the devastating effect of extremism should be portrayed.
We should also be alive to the excesses of Dostoevsky in a tendency towards Populism, veneration of an abstract volk and the denunciation of minorities, including Jews.
Overall, he stands as the greatest intellect literature has produced, a mystic and theoretician, as well as a practical journalist. Moreover, the novels contain far more insightful philosophy than most arid books of philosophy,
Along with Leonardo da Vinci, and even more so than Shakespeare, I would go so far as to say that he is the greatest genius that has ever drawn breath. I suspect he would have been distrustful of da Vinci’s cosmopolitanism and veneration of science. Sparks will surely fly if they ever meet!
